Everyone born in Brazil hears the story of the “jeitinho brasileiro” (the Brazilian knack for finding a way around things) from a very early age. You hear people say that a true Brazilian never gives up and always finds a way, whether illegally, at other people’s expense, or through trickery. Most of the time, this “finding a way” has a pejorative meaning, especially when portrayed by people from other countries. But what if the jeitinho brasileiro were seen from another angle? What if “never giving up” meant finding creative solutions to everyday problems?
The jeitinho brasileiro that solves problems Thinking is too cheap to be taken seriously; creativity is too personal and too intangible to be seen as something that will solve problems. When we think about the main needs of our time, such as health, housing, public transportation, and infrastructure, there is very little reflection behind them. What gets put in is money, and expensive physical solutions to problems that could be solved with cheap creativity, which the world, however, considers unreliable. You know how it goes: you arrive on Monday with a lot of work to do, but with things piled up from last week, so you have to finish everything from last week before you can start on this week’s. Inevitably, everything falls behind again, and on top of that the work gets done in the most practical, mechanical way possible, in other words, sloppily. What should really matter is the time spent thinking a little about how to innovate so that things don’t pile up and everything gets done calmly and well. When we talk about the jeitinho brasileiro, we rarely hear stories like that of Alfredo Moser, a mechanic from Minas Gerais who came up with the idea of taking PET bottles filled with water and a little chlorine and placing them under the roof of his house to provide light. Or the story of community leader Rosa Gonçalves, a former farmworker and domestic worker from the São Paulo coast who ended up in London. There she created the Guarita Community Cafe, which, besides offering a variety of menus based on Brazilian, Caribbean, and African flavors, works hard to offer training so that young people from the community can learn to manage and run kitchens and customer service.
Alfredo Moser and his bottle light bulb. And then there are the stories everyone knows: Santos Drummond, Ayrton Senna, Pelé, Ronaldinho Gaúcho, Neymar. Perhaps giving a little more importance to these “jeitinhos brasileiros” is the way for us to value stronger, more spontaneous, richer ideas that belong to the whole of our lives, without separating work from deeper personal experiences.
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